


Best Friends Forever

by ViAwkwardPerson



Series: miscellaneous stories that aren't really a part of a fandom (read:mostly schoolwork) [1]
Category: Original Work, Sneedronningen | The Snow Queen - Hans Christian Andersen
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Mages, Magic, Possession, asdnjksad, because this is about double the max length, before the end of the day, i hate this, i have to rewrite this, lol, this is why you dont procrastinate kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:46:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22071259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViAwkwardPerson/pseuds/ViAwkwardPerson
Summary: This is a remake (?) thing of "The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Anderson that I did for school, but it was way too long to submit and thus here we are, this is unedited and not revised whatsoever.Gerda and Kay are both students studying magic at university. Kay ends up summoning a demon. It's all chill. (Not)
Series: miscellaneous stories that aren't really a part of a fandom (read:mostly schoolwork) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1588663





	Best Friends Forever

Gerda was having possibly the worst month of her life. Her best friend, Kay, had gotten more and more distant from her with no apparent reason. Second, all of her professors suddenly got grouchy earlier this month and whatever it was obviously wasn’t fixed, because they were still moody. This week, though, they were all beyond just moody and grouchy, screaming at every little thing, and lines of worry had started to cut deep in most of their faces. And to top it all off, it was finals month. Most universities only have finals week, but the university Gerda attended thought that a good mage should learn how to balance chaos for extended periods of time, or something like that. 

It was midnight when Gerda left the library. It was a long ways from her apartment, so she decided to go to Kay’s. He’d been ignoring her for weeks, but he’d probably let her stay the night. Hopefully. As she walked through the city in the cool, clear night, only one person passed her.

It was a man dressed in royal blue robes accented with gold, but that was all she could see in the dark. It was definitely one an average student couldn’t afford seeing as the gold was glittering with the wearer’s movements. Someone that could afford the piece of clothing definitely wouldn’t live in the area - it was filled with some of the cheapest, and thus rundown, apartments in the city.

She wondered about the man until she reached the front steps of Kay’s apartment building. It was made of white concrete with different potted plants and bits and bobs floating in front of it, suspended in the air with the arcane that gave it a dim purple glow. At first glance, that would seem to be the only magical thing about the building, but Gerda knew that the only thing keeping the building standing was also magic. She used the spare key card that Kay gave her to open the door.

She walked up the stairs that groaned with every step, until she reached the third floor and walked to apartment twelve and knocked. But instead of Kay, his roommate, Beau, opened the door instead. He had a mop of feathery black hair that shone dark blue in the day. He looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks: dark bags under his eyes, his brown skin a sickly yellow, and the look of a wild animal, about to be attacked at any moment. His eyes were darting from one side of the room to another, looking at everything but Gerda.

“Where’s Kay?” Gerda asked, trying to look over Beau’s shoulder, “Is it alright if I stay the night here?”

“Kay’s gone. Hasn’t been seen in a week.” Beau lazily stated, despite still not making eye contact, “The police know, but you know how they are about mages.”

Mages were infamous for disappearing without a trace, but not students. Still, in the police’s eyes, there was zero difference between students and fully fledged spellcasters. The police most likely never even looked at the case, dismissing it the second the word “mage” was uttered. Someone would have to do their job for them, if Kay was ever to be found.

Looking at Beau, Gerda could tell that this job would fall on her - if she even wanted to find Kay, anyways. In the almost deafening silence, she contemplated if she could avoid looking for him at all. If he was still alive, he would probably turn up sometime or another. Gerda was too busy at the moment to go on wild goose chases for missing friends, anyways.

Or, that’s what she was trying to console herself with. The truth of the matter was, she barely even talked to Kay anymore. Then, there was the matter of Kay’s sudden change in behavior towards her - he went from understanding, kind, and brave to… well, Gerda didn’t really know. He had cut her off too quickly. The few interactions were only enough to know that he was moody and selfish, he had gone from the protector of others to a glory-seeker on a flip of a switch.

Gerda realized Beau was looking at her, expectant.  
she realized. She couldn’t though, she knew this - almost six hundred gold a year would go to waste if she decides to play detective and skip studying for her exams.

...But, maybe Kay’s disappearance would have something to do with his change in character. Maybe she could get the Kay she knew back…

She knew what she had to do.

“Where was he last?” Gerda firmly inquired, a determination in her eyes.

“Well, he was making off to the alchemy lab, the one accessable to students? To work on his potions project. I dunno if ever made it there or not, but it’s a start, I guess.” Beau shrugged his shoulders.

The second Beau was done speaking, Gerda turned on her heel, repositioning her bag and throwing a quick “Thank you!” over her shoulder as she practically sprinted down the hallway and bounding down the stairs, two steps at a time.

When she found herself at the lab, out of breath, she noticed that she forgot to ask which one. So, she peered through each one, all of them appearing normal. Except for the locked one. At the door, she set down her bag and began to rummage through it, looking for her “Book of Spells Every Mage Should Know.”

She found it, flipped through a couple pages until she landed on her go-to lockpicking spell, and tried to focus on the arcane energies. She always had an easier time with arcane, seeing as it drew its power from within the user, and not from outside sources, unlike other types of magic, like frost, for instance.

She heard the lock click and she opened the door to a cloud of dust. Coughing and wheezing, she stumbled into the room with her eyes burning. This wasn’t normal dust. It was the dust leftover from a spell gone wrong. Very. Wrong.

She knew this because: 1.) She sensed the off magical aura that the dust gave off and 2.) the dust was obsidian black.  
As the dust settled again, Gerda saw papers skewed across one lab table and the floor surrounding it, some of them torn from a raven-black spellbook, some of them notes that the mage had taken. As Gerda walked to the table and then around it, she saw that a summoning circle was scorched into the wooden flooring. And, as Gerda realized, angry claw marks were littering the entire room. One bookshelf was nearly empty, books on the floor, most of them burnt.

Whatever had happened, was not good.

Which was why Kay’s bag and stuff just  
to be sitting next to the summoning circle. Or what was left of it, anyway.

Gerda sighed with resignation as she began to flip through her spellbook, 

She intentionally made sure that she was a good four feet away from the circle and the table when she cast the spell.

An arcane circle that paralleled the summoning circle appeared around her feet, with runes made of purple fire circling around her feet, blazing to life at her call and lighting her entire figure with an amethyst glow.

The spell would allow her to see what happened at the time the spell was cast, what happened after, and where the spellcaster went.

She concentrated, beads of sweat starting to form on her brow, and held her hand out, palm down, and below her palm was another circle of arcane, and she focused her thoughts on the summoning circle and began to murmur the cant of the spell.

She got a faint glimmer at the energy from the circle, dark in nature, and metaphorically lunged at it. As she pulled it up, she was able to get what she wanted as the dark, dusty room began to fade away, being replaced by a newer version of itself, streams of golden sunlight donning the room, and she found Kay, as he began to cast his spell.

The circle blazed to life in front of him, the red fire cutting deep into the wood. In the middle of it, a dark figure began to form and Gerda realized what it was, trying to nervously swallow and back away, even though she knew it was just a vision.

Why had Kay been trying to summon a demonic sprite? And not just any sprite, it was  
demonic sprite. The one only heard in legends, the one who first brought death, pain, and plague into the world. Said to never kill its prey, never directly. Instead it possesses them, trapping their souls even after their body has died, for all of eter- oh, lord. So that was what happened to Kay.

It had obviously not gone well. The spell quickly went out of control, and the sprite prematurely broke out of its circle, launching itself at Kay in a burst of charcoal dust that coated the entire room. Kay yelped, and tried to blast a fireball at the sprite, but he missed, the fire ball nearly hitting Gerda and making contact with the bookshelf instead. 

Kay fell backwards as he sent off the blast and scrambled out of the way, the sprite’s claws digging into the wooden planks instead of Kay’s chest. Kay frantically jumped up and turned the corner, trying to at least put the lab table between them, readying another fire blast on the tips of his fingers.

The sprite quietly and quickly - abnormally and freakishly quickly - circles the room, so that it now, it was right behind Kay. He had no idea, and was staring and scanning the lab table, his eyes darting from left to right, his curly hair a mess and filled with the black dust, and he looks like he could’ve just came up from a coal mine.

Gerda looked away as the sprite lunged at Kay’s back. The air, which was previously only filled with dust and beams of light from the sun, were now also accompanied by her best friend’s screams of agony.

She heard the resistance from her friend’s side, all right. Chairs were knocked over, lab benches were smashed into, beakers were smashed. Some of his attempts actually knocked the sprite off, and whenever it missed, it would scratch and claw the wood or metal or whatever it landed on.

This went on for quite some time, until, apparently, the sprite wanted to quit playing games. It’s long, twisted claws started to radiate darkness, and it lunged at Kay’s chest with force enough to knock him down. The sprite’s claws dug deep into Kay and Kay’s screams could only echo throughout the room as Kay slowly went limp.

But he wasn’t dead. No, after a couple seconds or so, Kay calmly stood up again, and used a type of very, very advanced frost magic to materialize a new outfit, robes of royal blue accented with intricate golden designs - Gerda knew because only a handful of mages in the world could materialize something like clothing without using arcane magic.

Kay didn’t even know beginner’s frost magic. That was something only third and fourth years did. They were in second. This was the sprite.

But, with his new outfit on, Gerda gasped. This was the man she had seen walking in the streets while she was walking to Kay’s apartment. It was at this point that Gerda ended the spell. She didn’t know of any way to get Kay back, at this point.

And the vision faded away, and the room became dull and monotone once again. Gerda numbly realized that Kay was most likely what had gotten the teacher’s so stressed out, which makes sense. His personality had started to shift around the time that the teachers’ moods first changed, and his summoning a literal demon from hell coincided with the second.

They probably knew almost everything she did, but just in case, she wanted to tell one of the stressed out teachers of Kay’s personality shifts and where she saw him earlier that night.

As she turned towards the door, though, she realized with a sinking horror in her gut that she was, in fact, not alone.

Kay was standing in the doorway.

Gerda cursed under her breath. What was she supposed to do now? That’s an ancient demonic sprite inhabiting her best-friend-since-childhood’s body standing just under twenty feet away. She tried running through her options as it was slowly approaching her. She could try to kill it, which would go even worse than it did for Kay - the sprite had a host, it didn’t need to keep Gerda alive. Also, it would kill Kay in the process.

She could try and do the “Kay, fight it!” thing, but would that really work? Was Kay even able see or listen to her anymore? Or, maybe she could try and go along with what it wanted? If that didn’t include killing her, of course. Kindness goes a long way and all that? Right?

Gerda could also teleport away, but to where? She only had a teleport set up to the plaza, which was in front of most of her classes and her apartment. The plaza was right outside the building, and her apartment was one of the first place the sprite would go looking. It would still buy her time, though. 

But, teleporting, while it would have been the best option, was no longer an option, Gerda realized. Since she was just a student, her spells took a lot longer to cast than a regular mage’s did. It would take her about ten uninterrupted seconds to complete the spell, and in that time the sprite could easily cross the room and tackle her, or cast a spell like a fireball on her, or something.

Kay had stopped, and he was around ten feet away from her, his hands almost frozen in the air, in the position to cast a spell. His hands were shaking like leaves, and when Gerda looked him in the eye, she could see no other emotion but pure terror on his face.

Was… Was Kay trying to fight it?

“Kay? Is that you?” She tried. She had no idea what to say, what to do. “I…”

She swallowed. Should she say she was sorry for not realizing what had happened to him - what was happening to him - until it was too late? But would she want to die with ‘sorries’ on her lips?

“Do… do you remember those times, where we’d play pranks on your neighbor? The one with the annoying, ugly, black cat, with patches of fur and one eye? Or listen to your grandma and her stories?”

Her voice wavered, and her eyes stung, but tears did not fall.

The sprite took a step forward, and began to cast its spell. 

Still, Gerda kept speaking, because goddammit if she was going to die by her best friend’s hand, she would spend it reminiscing about the good times, when they were children without a care in the world.

“Oh, remember when we would come into you grandma’s house, covered head to toe in mud? Oo, we used to sneak off into Mr. Miller’s fields of grain, right before the harvest, and play hide and seek?”

The sprite’s spell was almost complete, and she saw that Kay was crying.  
“Remember, when we were in the first grade, and the other schoolkids thought that we were the most likely to get married someday? We almost got married, that one time in recess, with Ring Pops?” Gerda laughed at the memory, and her tears started to fall.

She saw a blur of ice, and then it hit her heart, and she immediately collapsed as black spots danced around her vision.

She saw Kay rush over to her in a blur of blue, and the last words that Gerda would hear in that room were: “I’m sorry.” Kay knelt down and hugged her.

And she replied, “Don’t be.”

And then she died.


End file.
